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architecture

JAOO Australia

April 24, 2009
agile, architecture, bdd, events, talks, tdd
4 Comments

A friend of mine has a Far Side desk calendar that he describes it as a barometer for how busy he is. Some days he finds himself tearing off a whole bunch of pages because he’s been too busy or distracted to tear one off each day.

I noticed a couple of weeks ago that I haven’t blogged anything for over six months. It’s been hectic. I’m planning to be blogging more over the coming weeks and months. I’ve got a ton of things to write up, ranging from planning and estimation – it’s no wonder we are useless at it – we don’t even know where to start!, to architecture – why you wouldn’t want to go on a date with Maven, by way of build and release engineering – why Ivy means Ant is still the king of cool.

JAOO Australia

I’m in Sydney at the moment where I’ll be speaking at JAOO Australia which is in a couple of weeks time. It’s like a pocket-sized, portable version of the European JAOO conference. In fact it is two conferences, one in Sydney (May 5-8) and one in Brisbane (May 11-14). There are two days of tutorials and two days of conference proper, and it looks like it’s going to be great fun. Both conferences are small enough (a few hundred people) that there will be ample opportunity to hang out with speakers and ask the questions you really want answered. And buy them beer.

I’ll be Pimping my Architecture and doing tutorials on BDD (principles and methodology) and TDD in Java (technical workshop), the latter with the lovely Erik Doernenburg.

If you can get to either city on those dates I would highly recommend it. As of writing neither event has sold out so there is still time. JAOO is one of the best geek conferences I know, with a great mix of technology (languages and frameworks), methodology (with an Agile flavour), architecture (from cloud to iphone) and soft stuff (Your brain is deceiving you. Yes you. Even though you know it is!)

SOA for the rest of us

September 2, 2007
agile, architecture, articles, programming, services, soa, software
13 Comments

Earlier this year I wrote an article to introduce service-oriented architecture to non-technical people. It was published in the May 2007 issue of Better Software magazine.

The kind folks at Better Software have allowed me to provide a PDF version of the article, complete with retro 1950s graphics. You can also read it as a single html page.

Please post any comments here, because I’ve disabled comments on the page itself.

Catching up

June 19, 2007
agile, architecture, java, programming, real-options, ruby, simplicity, soa, summary
3 Comments

It turns out that having a day job can play havoc with your blogging activities. I’m posting a round-up of recent activities, in no particular order, with the intention of expanding on each of these topics in the coming weeks. But we all know what happens to intentions.

This is mostly a brain dump to make me feel guilty enough to write some of it up, so feel free to skip it if you’re busy. That FaceBook page isn’t going to update itself you know.

Simplicity

At last year’s XP Day in London I got involved in a fishbowl discussion, with the likes of Kevlin Henney among others. Kevlin gets simplicity. To me it’s the holy grail of software development, and it’s all about expressing intent clearly. If you can’t make a system any simpler, then you’re done (simple, not simplistic). Likewise if you can express the intent of an application in a clearer way, you still have work to do. Erik Doernenberg and I shaped this theme into a keynote that I’ll pretend I’m going to write up at some point.

Performance tuning

A couple of years ago I did a performance tuning gig with a major retailer in the US. It was their first foray into J2EE and they were struggling with the impedence mismatch between OO and the relational database. Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing up the various approaches we took to achieve the results we got (startup time down from 10 minutes to 45 seconds, query times down from over 30 minutes to sub-second), because in the intervening period I’ve seen some of the patterns repeating themselves elsewhere.

Agile SOA

I have my “safe” topics that I’m very familiar with presenting: coaching and learning, agile and BDD, various technology topics. Last month I presented outside of my safe zone – on “SOA for Human Beings” at the ExpertZone conference in Stockholm.

SOA is not like the other kids. On one level it’s so vague it’s almost Zen: “What is SOA?” “It’s whatever you want it to be”. Secondly, it’s largely misunderstood as being a technology thing rather than a business thing. Thirdly, it’s often deliberately misrepresented as the reason you have to purchase a particular toolset.

So I stood up in front of the 17 attendees and said: we won’t be discussing code this afternoon – we might not even discuss technology. And we all had a much better afternoon because of it. There were a number of themes that came up during that session, and I’ll try to do them justice in a future article.

Builders, Commands and Fluent Interfaces

I’ve been architecting! You know, like properly designing software on a project as a tech lead. It’s great fun – I’d forgotten how much I liked it. My favourite current toys are builders – in particular fluent interfaces – and the command pattern. Suddenly my world is a simpler and happier place. Come to think of it, I’ve just rolled off a project with Patrick Kua as my tech lead. Talks a lot of sense does Patrick.

BDD in Ruby

Got rbehave out. Phew!

BDD in Java

At some point in the last couple of months, it seems we released JBehave 1.0! It’s been a labour of love, made up of infrequent short bursts of activity interspersed with long periods of day job. Lucky for me, Liz Keogh stepped up and took the reins, and with the help of some other great developers got it to 1.0. I’m very pleased with what we’ve accomplished so far, but there’s plenty more to do. In particular I want to introduce a fluent story builder to remove the need to hand-wire all the stories, and see if we can use some Java 5 goodness to simplicate things.

Real Options

No, not the things traders buy and sell. This is an overlooked branch of mathematics that explains why deferring decisions responsibly is a Good Thing, but deferring them past their “use by” date is just dumb.

My good friend Chris Matts has written an article about real options with Olav Maassen. In a demonstration of the interconnectedness of all things, there are at least two JBehave connections here. Chris was the guy who made the observation that BDD-as-TDD was just like business analysis, which in turn led to the whole story/scenario vocabulary. Olav was the first contributor to JBehave, writing a JBehave Ant task back in 2004. They are both mad as a box of badgers which means the article makes for interesting reading.

Upcoming Talks

February 28, 2007
accu, agile, architecture, bdd, expertzone, qcon, roots, ruby, services, soa, talks
4 Comments

I’ve got a number of tutorials, conference sessions and keynotes coming up over the next few months that I’m very excited about. My themes for this year are behaviour-driven development, SOA for human beings and understanding what simplicity really means. Looking at these, there is an overarching theme about getting different kinds of people talking to each other in plain English (for some value of English).

Keynote at QCon, 14-16 March, London

QCon is the London version of the excellent JAOO conference in Denmark, which has become my favourite technology event of the year (apart from phone upgrade time). They attract world-class presenters to provide sessions varying from the deep technical through to people and process topics, and they’ve done the same with QCon. What’s more, they have managed to resist the lure of the sales-pitch session, which means you get to hang out with other geeks without people trying to sell you stuff. The London event is being run in conjunction with the common-sense guys at InfoQ, and I’m lucky enough to be speaking there.

I’m delivering a keynote with Martin Fowler about the gaping crevasse between what business people ask for and what technical people think they want. I’ve presented with Martin a couple of times before – at least I know I’ll only be the second loudest person in the room.

ThoughtWorks is a “platinum sponsor”, which I think means we get to buy more drinks than the other sponsors.

BDD in Ruby at ACCU, 11-14 April, Oxford

ACCU is a conference by geeks, for geeks. With its roots in the C++ community, there are lots of strange people in weird industries like embedded systems, graphics engines and writing music software. It’s a refreshing change for me, where “enterprise systems” usually means moving data from over here to over there.

I’m actually at ACCU by accident, presenting behaviour-driven development in Ruby. They haven’t noticed yet that I haven’t touched C++ in ten years, and I’m not about to tell them.

However, the ACCU folks are developing a strong liking for dynamic languages – last year Guido van Rossum, the inventor of Python, delivered a keynote, and I co-presented a session introducing Ruby and Rails. So perhaps there’s life after the standard template library after all :)

Coaching workshop and BDD session at Expo-C, 23-25 April, Gothenberg

You know the tutorial days that tend to happen either side of a conference? Well Expo-C has adopted the model of having mostly tutorial days and hardly any conference! The 23rd and 25th are tutorial days, with two speakers presenting full-day tutorials on each day (I’m on the 23rd). The middle day is made up of seminars by a number of presenters. As the only speaker who hasn’t published a book (one of the presenters, Jim Coplien, has a small library to his name), I can safely say it’s a very solid line-up. Also, it’s one of the smaller conferences so there is lots of opportunity to hang out with the presenters.

I presented a tutorial day last year around the theme of agile delivery and thoroughly enjoyed it. This year I’m doing something a bit different, focusing on “Change, Coaching and Communication”, using NLP and life coaching principles as the basis of a one day interactive workshop. As with last year, there won’t be any PowerPoint, mostly because I’m rubbish with PowerPoint.

I’ll also be presenting a behaviour-driven development session on the seminar day.

Keynote and SOA workshop at ROOTS, 25-27 April, Bergen (Norway)

I’ve not been to ROOTS before but I’ve heard good things about it. It’s a developer-centric conference and this year it features the likes of Kevlin Henney, Jim Coplien (who I’ll be racing to Norway from Expo-C) and lovely testing guru Linda Rising.

Erik Doernenberg and I are delivering a keynote on the nature of simplicity, and we’re running a three hour workshop looking at SOA for human beings.

Keynote and SOA workshop at ExpertZone, 23-25 May, Stockholm

I met Josefin Andersson, one of the organisers of ExpertZone, earlier this year and she convinced me I had to attend the ExpertZone Developer Summit in Stockholm. Since I’m scared of Josefin, I said yes. Also Microsoft’s Beat Schwegler will be there, and he rocks.

I’ll be delivering another keynote with Erik Doernenberg, based on our current pet themes of simplicity and clarity of intent (honestly, how hard can software be?), and running the workshop on SOA for humans.

I’ve been told by the Boss that I’m not allowed out of the house in June.

What’s so hard about Event-Driven Programming?

April 9, 2006
architecture, concurrency, design, programming, software
6 Comments

I was lucky enough to attend the Software Architecture Workshop in Cortina recently. It was a three day workshop based around the idea of Open Spaces, which involves handing the asylum keys to the inmates and seeing what happens.

I convened a session called “What’s so hard about Event-Driven Programming?” to explore the experiences of the other delegates in designing, implementing and testing asynchronous, event- or message-driven systems. I took the position that actually it was all very straightforward as long as you followed a few basic principles. Another delegate, Mats Helander, took the opposing view that asynchronous, event-based systems could develop scary emergent behaviour that would lead to a world of hurt.
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